What do you want to BE when you grow up?

When was the last time as an adult you thought of your profession as a state of being?

For those of you that are teachers, you exempt from this.

Few these days would label their professions as a state of being, unless they are still paying off large sums of student debt.  Why is that?

People seem to have no issue identifying their job in quantified tangible terms.   Yet somewhere in the process of schooling there was a shift from 'being' to 'functioning as'.  I of course have met adults who identify with being their jobs, but generally they have job satisfaction.  It is an interesting rift, that.

The more pleased with a given current professional work environment, the more identified they are with it.  As though the job called to them, rather than them applying for the job.  I often ponder over whether this shift is a survival mechanism brought on by wage stagnation. 

From what I understand of yesteryear, jobs of any status has status associated with them.  The shift in the workplace seems to have robbed away not only pay increases, but job satisfaction.  The increase in productivity without any parallel in wages removed the status from virtually professions making less than fifty-thousand a year (net, not gross).  Wage is the only determining factor, for most profession below what I will call the 'realistic poverty line'.   I am not, of course expressing a need to increase the wages to all meet that line, in that it would simply inflate the costs of goods all around.  What I am attempting to bring to light is the seeming pervasive death of 'job status' within society. 

That is not to say there is a lack of passion in given professions, but there certainly is a lack of wages and benefits within American culture.  I would theorize that previously, part of a job benefit was the status and familiarity of a given class of people.  Take mailmen for instance.  Previously a high status job with little pay.  There was  built in cultural aspect of familiarity to mailmen, an instinctive friendliness towards them. 

I believe one of the major reasons for the death of 'job status' is certainly population explosion. There is very little means of garnishing a personal relationship in larger cities with given status jobs.  And without that small psychological boost, it would seem the only means of determining the value of a job and the self worth that that person within the job, is financial.